My Big TOE
AWAKENING – DISCOVERY — INNER WORKINGS
A TRILOGY UNIFYING PHILOSOPHY, PHYSICS, AND METAPHYSICS
Thomas Campbell
Book 1 – Awakening – Abridged Version – Part 6
We project our personal consciousness onto the field of action of a multi-player interactive reality game whose point is our individual growth and learning. The experience of consciousness, as well as the evolution of consciousness through choice, is entirely personal. However, an awareness of a larger (source) consciousness and an understanding of its properties are accessible through scientifically probing and objectively assessing the value and operational characteristics of the subjective experience of personal consciousness.
One method of accomplishing an assessment of subjective inner space is through meditation. Learning to meditate is like learning to play a musical instrument: It takes a serious steady effort before you should expect to make music instead of screeching noises. It takes dedication over a much longer time before you can master the basics of the instrument and play it well. Unfortunately, most people who pick up an instrument and give it a try give up before they ever learn to play it well. So it is with meditation.
As mentioned previously, going through the motions, or in this analogy, pretending to play an instrument, regardless of how perfect or impressive the visual (external) display produces no significant results.
There are many effective paths to personal growth — meditation is only one. Within the wide range of practices that circumscribe what we have loosely defined as meditation, there are many different types, approaches, and methods. Because it is the easiest, most effective, and universally applicable, a simple mental-awareness meditation is the path of choice for most teachers and students who have no dogma to propagate. Within this subset of meditation, there are many differing techniques. The technique you choose is not as important as the application of steady effort — so choose a technique that suits you. Within this genre of meditation, you do not actually have to learn how to meditate; you need only to learn how to stop blocking the meditation state from occurring naturally.
Though we are pursuing the dubious subject of what you can do in order to undo what you have inadvertently done, I will help you out here because I know your cultural beliefs force you to begin with a physical process. It will be helpful to your doing and undoing if you understand meditation — its purpose and how it works. With this understanding, you can custom design your own personal spiritual growth doing thing — a physical and mental process that may lead you toward a higher quality of being. The doing process cannot get you there by itself, but it can serve as the on-ramp.
The meditation state that I encourage you to achieve represents a condition of inner attentiveness wherein you become aware of your personal consciousness. This, in time, leads to the awareness that you are a unit of consciousness among many such units. Eventually, you will regain your fundamental identity as a spiritual (nonphysical) entity — as well as understand your relationship, your oneness, with all consciousness. Personal growth is a natural result of meditation.
Becoming aware of your consciousness is analogous to that fish becoming aware of water. The fish is aware only of its interaction with water. It experiences water through doing, through action, through its objective causal interactions with water. Yet water has existence and significance in its own right beyond the interactions of that and other fish. To become aware of water, one must differentiate between water and a subset of the properties of water. The fish is aware only of the latter.
The fish experiences water only in terms of its limited interactions (experience). It experiences variations in current, temperature, salinity, viscosity, and dynamic limitations, but does it actually experience water in a fundamental or broad sense? Is the fish right? Is water nothing more than the sensed variations in its properties? Does water with no variations in its properties cease to exist as water, or does it simply become an invisible background to the fish because the fish can no longer perceive it? To appreciate your and the fish’s limitations, imagine the perfect sensory deprivation tank where your local environment disappears because of zero input to your senses. Granted, this is not a perfect analogy, but you get the idea. When you are totally immersed in something, such as cultural belief systems for example, that something often becomes invisible because you cannot differentiate it from the background of your local reality — there is no contrast to bring it to the attention of your senses. Consciousness is like that.
Like the fish, we define our consciousness in terms of our doing — in terms of the physical actions it allows us to take. The major attribute of consciousness can be summed up as awareness, yet we and our fish brethren are aware only of what we can physically do with it, how we interact with a subset of its properties. Moreover, we can only interact with that subset of properties that are contrasted enough against the invisible background of primal consciousness for us to notice. We create a foreground of contrasts, relationships, and variations in the fabric of absolute consciousness that we define as representing ourselves. “See that cute little wad of wrinkles in the fabric of consciousness? That’s me!” But you are more than the wrinkles; you are also consciousness, a piece of the whole. Meditation lets us experience the invisible background of consciousness. It lets us notice the water itself, not just variations and contrasts in its local properties relative to an invariant constant.
The point of meditation is to enable you to become aware of your consciousness and thereby introduce you to your larger self. Becoming aware of your consciousness at a fundamental level will eventually lead you to see the real you, the complete you, the whole you, the sacred and the soiled — fears and all. Without the ego to hide the scary parts by inventing an attention-getting “I vs. other” delusional contrast, it is not always a pretty sight.
How does meditation lead you to experience your consciousness? By turning down the contrast, noise, and other activity that makes up the busy foreground — by turning dawn, and eventually turning off, the cacophony of mental interactions, judgments, and operational processes. To become aware of your consciousness as opposed to being aware of the thoughts that inhabit your consciousness) you must eliminate the obsessive preoccupations most of us have with ego based self-definition — the contrasts that you use to define yourself against the relatively unchanging, invisible background of your individual consciousness. Meditation is thus an act of not doing. It is an exercise in removing enough of the contrasting clutter of your mind to get a glimpse of the real you.
Individual consciousness is a subset of absolute consciousness. You are not only the clutter, the wrinkles, the ego, the thoughts — even if that is how you unwittingly define yourself. You are much more than that. Meditation allows you to discover that fact in a uniquely personal way. That is its purpose — self-discovery — a glimpse of the fundamental reality of which you are an integral part.
This discovery is possible for humans because, at least theoretically, our memory capacity and processing capability is somewhat greater (and contains less entropy) than that of the average fish. The fish will never directly experience or contemplate unvarying water (the fish equivalent to total sensory deprivation), but you can experience the fundamental nature of your consciousness if you truly want to. If your desire to know yourself and to know the truth at the deepest level of your existence is not strong enough to provide the necessary focus, energy, and persistence required to succeed, you are not yet ready to begin that journey. There is no rush and no penalty for not being ready. It is much better to wait until you are ready than to push yourself into a state of self-limiting frustration.
Do you see why meditation is almost universally prescribed as the first step — the doorway to understanding and exploring consciousness, as well as to the attainment of spiritual growth? It makes sense that a program to develop your consciousness should naturally start with finding and becoming acquainted with that consciousness. There are other methods, but they apply less universally, are more difficult to learn, and are much more difficult to teach. Meditation will work wonderfully when you are ready. You may first need to work on getting ready by developing an honest desire to grow spiritually and the courage to pursue Big Truth to its conclusion. You may need to first overcome some of the fear and cultural beliefs to which you have become attached.
How does meditation clear out the clutter and reduce the noise level of a mind caught in a self-referential endless loop of obfuscating circular logic? The technique is simple and straightforward — the trappings of ritual, dogma, belief, and physical process are mostly irrelevant. You simply stop the incessant operational, self-referential, contrast producing chatter of the mind by filling the mind up with something less distracting, less self-focused and less obsessively driven. While the mind is preoccupied with non-operative busy-work, you can experience the still center of your being. Eventually, after much practice, you can let go of the mental busy-work and explore the larger reality of consciousness from an imperturbable, still, and quiet place that will slowly develop and grow larger at the center of your being.
Some traditions call this mental busy-work assignment a “mantra.” Traditionally this is a sound of some sort, but in this Big TOE we are bound only by science, not tradition. We quickly move to toss belief, dogma, and ritual out of the window and focus, by experimental result, only on the active ingredients of mantra. Science allows the concept of mantra to be generalized to accommodate the various ways we take in and process information through our five senses. Typically, people tend to take in most of their experiential input data through their ears (auditory), eyes (visual) or sense of touch (kinesthetic). Many people absorb information more effectively through one of these avenues of data input than they do through the others. Over the previous decade or so, the popular literature is full of assessments of personality type and characteristics by data input preference. It makes no sense to force everyone dawn the traditional auditory path — some people simply do not get it that way.
If you are not now successfully meditating, and have no idea where or how to find a suitable technique to do so, I will provide to you, free of charge — for this one time only — a mentally calming busy work mantra custom made for your personal mind that is based upon each of the dominant perception types. Simply use the one or combination that seems to work the best for you. For those more heavily into smell and taste than the average humanoid form, I am sure that you can follow the three examples given to custom fit a smelly or yummy mantra to suit your individual preferences.
After explaining each mantra, I will, against my better judgment, tell you what you can do with them. Oh, no, not like that — I wouldn’t be that rude! I understand that your Western mind-set needs to begin everything with physical process whether it makes sense or not.
Those who seriously want to get started on their spiritual journey, but find themselves caught in the headlights of physical action-reaction causality, will now have something to do. It may or may not help you improve the quality of your consciousness — that depends on you — but it will give the committed doers a place to start. Often that is what is needed — a place to start — a doable approach to the problem of how to modify the quality of your being. This could be the step you need to break free from the mesmerizing glare of those cultural beliefs that reduce, rather than extend, your vision. Try it: You may surprise yourself with some dramatic results.
For the audio types, we need a sound that means nothing, is two syllables, and ends in a soothing or vibratory sound. Here are a few examples of proven quality — take your pick or make up one of your own: “sehr-ring”, “da-room”, “ra-zing”, “ca-ouhn”, “sah-roon”, and “sher-loom.” For a simple multi-syllable repetitive string (chant), try: “ah-lum-bar-dee-dum — ah-lum-baa-dee-dum.” When the “bar” and “baa” regularly interchange themselves effortlessly, you will be well on your way. These are sounds, not words — it is important that they carry no intellectual meaning. The point of this exercise is to quiet your operative intellect so that you can experience consciousness directly by reducing the variations, comparisons, and contrasts that your ego-intellect imposes upon consciousness.
Feel free to mix and match — put any of the first syllables in front of any of the second syllables to produce no fewer than thirty-six unique mantras. For most people, it won’t make much difference which sound is used, but if one sound feels more natural than the others, use it. Obsessive-compulsive types should take care not to get wrapped around the axle trying to find the best one — any will do.
Lighten up; do not be intense and serious. Have no expectations. Sit in a comfortable quiet place where you will not be disturbed, close your eyes, and fill your mind with the sound of your chosen mantra — no need to make an actual sound. Focus your attention on the sound. Let the sound fill your mind — think of nothing else. Use whatever devices you need to stay focused on the sound — merely listen to it repeat itself. The repetition may be simple and straightforward or occur in interesting ways — perhaps with complex variations.
Eventually, let the sound of the mantra slow to a rhythmic, bland repetition and then slow and smear further into a continuous background sound. If thoughts creep in gently put them aside and refill your mind with the sound. If intruding thoughts constantly stream into your awareness, give the mantra a more active form. As thoughts disappear, leaving your mind empty, simplify and soften the sound of the mantra. Continue the meditation process uninterrupted for at least twenty minutes, twice a day for three months before evaluating the results. If the sound slips away, but no extraneous thoughts appear, let it go and drift in the quiet blankness of your consciousness — you will love it.
Visual types need a non-personal visualization that begins with complexity (but not detail) and ends with simplicity. You may start with a black and white soccer ball — then let the colors change to red and blue, let the ball begin to rotate slowly, let the colors change. Your image should be as clear as a watercolor painting, not as precise as a high-resolution photograph. Switch to a series of simple geometric shapes such as spheres, cubes, circles, triangles, cylinders, rectangles, and lines. Let them rotate slowly. Slowly change their size and colors. Choose one shape and let it change very slowly. Watch your images intently — think of nothing else.
Gradually progress your images toward greater simplicity and slower motion. Do not force the images; let them do what they want to as long as they do not disturb your tranquility. Look at your images uncritically and dispassionately, as if you were watching a plotless movie. If thoughts creep in, gently put them aside and refill your mind with more active images. Continue the meditation process uninterrupted for at least twenty minutes, twice a day for three months before evaluating the results. If the images slip away, but no extraneous thoughts appear, let them go and drift in the still oneness of your consciousness.
If you enjoy natural places, you might start with a scene — perhaps a generic beach. Hear the waves, feel the sand, smell the salt spray, listen to the sea gulls. Be there with all of your senses. Slowly simplify your image and focus on a few items at a time. Eventually you may narrow your focus to a single grain of sand. Go in close to inspect the tiny crystal from every angle. Choose the viewing angle you prefer and see how the light plays off the surface of the crystal. Back away until you can barely see its surface features. Hold that view as only you and the grain of sand quietly coexist within the void.
Choose images that particularly suit you. Be careful not to try too hard, and do not struggle with high resolution, image quality, or anything else. Images may be felt as well as seen. Struggling to make your meditation be how you think it should be is always counterproductive. No expectations. No struggle. No demands. The point is not to force your will on the process, but to let the process unfold naturally as it captivates your attention.
Remember that what you are trying to do without trying is to not do. Read that sentence again — don’t you just love it? If it makes sense to you, you are on your way. If it sounds like idiotic gibberish you should go back to the beginning of this aside and start over — but don’t get stuck in an endless loop — twice is enough.
For the kinesthetic types, we need textures that are non-personal, interesting and pleasant. For example, feel a rich velvet or fur coat as you mentally rub your hands slowly over it. Dig into it with your fingers, feel it rub across your arms and face. Explore the buttons or zipper, the seams, sleeves, and collar. Become tiny (or create a giant coat) and roll around on it, crawl into a pocket. Slowly let your sensing of the coat become simple and rhythmic. You might do the same thing with walking barefoot in squishy mud, or walking in the rain, or swimming in a pool filled with grape jelly. Start with complexity and progress to more and more simple rhythmic sensory stimulations. If thoughts creep in, gently put them aside and refill your mind with the sensations. Continue the meditation process uninterrupted for at least twenty minutes, twice a day for three months before evaluating the results. If the sensations slip away, but no extraneous thoughts appear, let the sensations go and drift aimlessly in the boundless depths of your consciousness.
Smell and taste mantras would work similarly to the kinesthetic mantra above. Use your imagination. Do not be afraid to mix and match the senses; combine them in ways that work for you. Have no intellectual or emotional connection to your mantra. Maintain only enough complexity to keep extraneous thoughts away — nothing should be in your mind except the sound, sight, feel, taste, or smell of the mantra. As intruding thoughts become less of a problem, simplify your mantra. When you no longer need it to maintain a state of blank thoughtless existence, let it go.
The point here is to learn to control your thoughts and your operative mind so that you can experience your consciousness. This is a first and necessary step. Later you can learn how to direct that consciousness once you have freed it from a noisy, frantic, ego serving, perpetual tail chase. Do not try to direct it too soon — that will only delay your progress — get in touch with, and follow, the source of your intuition. Do not pursue or chase after specific or general results. All results must come to you. If you go after them, it will only delay your progress.
Continue to experiment and to taste the pudding periodically. Natural, easy, patient, and gentle are the hallmarks of a successful process. Result driven, ego driven, success driven, frustrated, forced, fearful, and having preconceived notions and expectations are the hallmarks of a wrong-headed flawed execution of the meditation process.
Experiment to find what works best and what feels most natural to you. After you find it, stick with it for a while. If thoughts intrude, as soon as you realize that your mind is no longer exclusively working with the mantra, put them gently aside. If thoughts continue to came, increase the complexity of your mantra a little. As thoughts disappear and do not return, decrease the complexity. Never try too hard. If you ever become frustrated, you are trying too hard. This is most important: Have absolutely no expectations and no specific goals.
This is also important: Do not begin to judge how well or poorly your meditation is working until you have found and implemented a productive meditation process twice daily for at least three to six months — then taste the pudding.
Do not analyze or compare, just experience — this is not an intellectual exercise and your analyzing justifying intellect will only get in the way. Never force the mantra — go with it, flow with it, and let whatever happens happen — this is a gentle activity with no preconceived notions of what the outcome should be or feel like. There will be plenty of time for evaluation and pudding tasting after you gain some basic competence. There must be a time to be critical, but not now — you do not know enough to be productively critical yet.
Let every meditation be an entirely new and unique experience. Do not force every meditation experience to be like a previous experience that was judged to be a good one. Continue tasting the pudding at three-month intervals. Look for the existence of measurable results in the form of objective changes in your being. After six months, ask people who are close to you if they notice a change in your approach to life. Be aware of your mental state, and how that state changes as the meditation progresses. Customize your meditation to suit yourself. Your meditation should become easier, more effective, and more efficient over time. Be patient, do not rush the process — trying to speed-up or push the process will only delay your progress.
Pay careful attention to the choices you make throughout your day.
Examine your motivations and intent relative to those choices. By an act of your will, modify your intents to be more giving, caring, loving, and to be less self-serving. Shift the focus from you, from what you want, need and desire, to what you can give to, and do for, others. In the same manner, change where and how you invest the energy that follows your intent in your relationships and interactions with other people.
Examine your motivations and intent as described above immediately before and after, but not during, each meditation. You must be consistent — that is most important. Once you get used to the exercise, thirty minutes twice a day is enough to accomplish both the meditation and the examination of your choices — take more if you wish, but much more is not necessary.
If you constantly end up in a state of frustration instead of a state of expanded awareness, let go, back off, and take a break until you can find a different perspective, a different attitude, or a different intent. Try a different mantra. Perhaps you are trying too hard. Perhaps you are limited by your belief and fear, or lack the necessary courage and drive. Perhaps you need to read and follow the instructions more carefully. Perhaps you are using a meditation technique that does not suit you. Perhaps you are not ready at this time. Don’t worry: Everything works out in its own time. There is no blame, no reason to feel badly, and no failure on your part. Continue to apply the meditation process gently and consistently and one day, when you relax, success will take you by surprise.
Everyone grows in their own way and in their own time. No one faults children for not being adults, though most children wish they were adults. There is no practical technique that allows you to skip steps. You are who and what you are — accept that gracefully. Work on getting ready by continuing to practice the given exercises gently and with no expectations. There is no faster process or better way to get ready than that.
Thus, we see that getting prepared and ready to grow, as well as actively progressing along a growth path, as well as optimizing the growth path that you are on, all follow the same prescription. It matters not what your initial conditions are or where your starting point is, the same set of meditation exercises are optimal and appropriate for all. That is why virtually everyone who wishes to follow the Path of Knowledge toward spiritual growth, toward improving the quality of their consciousness, is instructed to begin with daily meditation. Each individual will naturally extract from their meditation what they need for their next step.
The meditation experience is as individual and personal as is your consciousness.
This is a life’s work; it takes significant time to take root, blossom and bear fruit. Results will accrue in proportion to the energy that is invested productively. For example, with moderate effort, significant results should become obvious within six months to a year. Continue to apply the meditation process with gentle resolve; there is no rush, no test, and no diploma. You have all the time you need to get it right. Some will get it right away; others may take a long time. Gracefully accept however it comes to you — you have no choice. A teacher can only encourage and facilitate the evolution of your consciousness by helping you find opportunities to exploit on your own — spiritual growth, as any growth, is an internal process and cannot be forced from the outside.
Hopefully, these meditation exercises have addressed your need for a physical process to facilitate positive consciousness development. However, in doing so, I may have created a new problem for you — how to deal with the frustration that is often created by the inadequacy of doing to produce dramatic spiritual progress quickly. The Western attention span is notoriously short. To make matters worse, dramatic results are often required to overcome strongly opposing cultural belief systems. The fact is that progress in meditation, like progress in playing a musical instrument, usually accrues slowly and only becomes dramatic after significant time and effort has been invested. Progress accrues by the accumulation of many unnoticeable tiny successes. Take the long view and have patience.
Westerners caught in the glaring headlights of their cultural beliefs desperately need something to do before they become spiritual road kill — run-aver by mindless conformity and a blind obedience to the cultural norm. Thump! Splat! Oh jeez, what a mess! All the king’s horses and all the king’s men will have a difficult time getting that one back on the road to spiritual progress again.
Actually, it is unfair of me to pick on Westerners as being particularly limited by needing to do something in order to be something. Most Easterners are in the same doing-fixated boat. Their do-boat may appear to be bigger — not as confining perhaps — but just as limiting. Doing within a spiritual-cultural tradition is as problematical and unproductive as doing within a material-cultural tradition.
If you are so inclined, you now have something productive to do as well as an expanded perspective on the limitations and personal nature of that doing.
You now know what to do and how to do it, and if you settle in for the long haul with a serious commitment to finding Big Truth, you will succeed beyond your wildest dreams.